Putting the MB Genie Back in the Bottle

The military is taking power in Egypt and declaring a state of emergency to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood. We've seen this show before....

A lot of people who cheering the Arab Spring in Egypt in 2011, and the ousting of Hosni Mubarak forget how Mubarak came to be the leader. After Sadat was assassainated by the Muslim Brotherhood, Mubarak instituted a state of emergency to suppress the Brotherhood which ultimately lasted more than 30 years.

It lasted, that is, until the Arab Spring took the boot off of the neck of the MB, and the evil genie was out of the bottle.

A year later, the military is attempting to put the boot back on the neck. We'll see how it goes this time, when the whole of the Mideast seems to be on fire.

Prayers for the Coptic Christians under attack this week.

Super-cool with "Rebels"

Please fill in the blank for me in the question.

Our President has engaged our government in acts of providing lethal military weaponry to openly al-Qaida affiliated radical islamic jihadist "rebels" in efforts to depose or kill foreign leaders without an authorizing vote of our Congress, and I am super-cool with this because___________________.

Note: Your answer should not include "But.....Bush!"

Memorial Day Reflections

SSgt John Campisi, of Covina CA. That's who I think about first on every Memorial Day since 1990.

SSgt Campisi served our country in the 55th Organizational Maintenance Squadron (OMS) at Offutt AFB in Nebraska. I served as a SSgt in that unit as well, just down the road. I was a PMEL troop (test equipment calibration) with a cushy job in a environmentally controlled building. John was a flight line maintainer. We were roughly the same age. I was nine years married, and John was married with four children - two girls and two boys.

The 55th OMS deployed recon aircraft (and maintainers) within hours of Sadaam Hussein's troops crossing the border into Kuwait. John deployed. I performed my national security task from Omaha and - though I was ready to deploy - did not.

SSgt Campisi is listed as the first death in Operation Desert Shield. He was not killed in combat, but in a truck accident as a hazard of working long hours on a strange airfield at night. Tragic.

SSgt Campisi served his country in peacetime and, suddenly, in war. He deployed when called without question. He did not come home to his family. I think about his family now and then, and certainly on Memorial Day. How is his wife? Do his children know about him?

My prayers go out today to John Campisi's family. My gratitude today to all of the men and women who served and did not come home. We remember them.

Movies that are Tea Party, not Occupy!

What is it with Hollywood actors getting the politics of a movie wrong? It's aggravating. It happens more than I like.

I watched Les Miserables tonight on DVD. Having seen the stage musical 4 times, you can say I'm a fan. I enjoyed the movie version in the theater at Christmas, and then again tonight. I particularly enjoyed Hugh Jackman's role of Jean Val Jean, to which he brought an incredible portrayal of brokenness and redemption and mercy. True depth.

Ah, but then I made the mistake of watching Hugh Jackman the man opine in the special features about how timeless Les Miz is, and how the French Revolution and the Occupy movement started the same way. (Cue the documentary filmmaker who made the special feature to show glowing photo montages of the Occupy crowd).

Oh, heck no.

Did Jackman not watch the film he was in? The stage musical and the movie are conservative through and through. Tea Party conservative even. Certainly not representative of the Occupy Wall St phenomenon, which was organized by athiest Marxists.

Set aside that Les Miz is a spiritual musical / film which protrays and respects faith and personal redemption and charity. Just take in the early scenes of JVJ's treatment at the hands of the state versus his treatment by the Bishop of Digne, who saves his soul for God and transforms his life to a life of service and charity. A conservative vision indeed, and thoroughly un-Marxist.

Yes, Les Miz is a story about the wretched poor and their plight compared to the royal class. `But the solution to their poverty is not found in the failed revolution. It's found in the capitalist factory run by the mayor. A factory that he established using the capital of the silver given to him by the Bishop. JVJ sings it well in his inspiring self-examining solo "Who am I" when he sings "...I am the master of hundreds of workers, they all look to me. Can I abandon them, how will they live if I am not free?"

Indeed, Fantine starts her death spiral when she's forced to leave his factory and survive in the streets. Before that, working in JVJ's factory, she had the means to pay for the care of her daughter Cosette. After, as she died, she was forced to lean on the personal charity of the redeemed Christian man to rescue her little girl. Occupy Wall St. has nothing on that.

I had this same unsettling experience with actors last March when "The Hunger Games" came out. I had read all three books, and was eagerly anticipating the movie. Then I had the misfortune of watching Donald Sutherland compare his movie to Occupy Wall Street.

Oh, heck no.

Did Donald Sutherland even watch the movie he was in, or just read his lines in the script? The Hunger Games is not about New York City and Occupy Wall St. It's not about the 99% being oppressed by bankers and the one percent.

The Hunger Games is a Tea Party book. You can compare the Capitol in THG to our actual Capitol in Washington DC. The Capitol residents live in wretched excess just like our permanent political class does in DC, where the richest zip codes in America are. They play golf 128 times and are feted with top talent concerts in the West Wing while people out in the states (the "Districts") battle joblessness, layoffs, and inreasing taxation.

Note to Hollywood actors: Les Miserables and The Hunger Games are not leftist Occupy analogies. If anything, they are Tea Party conservative. Watch them again.

Benghazi Matters

I had a conversation with a co-worker this week. It went like this:

CW: "What's a Benghazi?"

Me: "It's where a terrorist attack ocurred last year on the anniversary of 9/11, and our ambassador was murdered."

CW: "Benghazi is a city?"

This is a college graduate asking me this question. 27 years old. A go-getter, good at her job.

This is a complete failure of media in our country.

I tried this week, as I traveled on business, to catch news of the Congressional hearings featuring the Benghazi whistleblowers. It was hard to find. No major media except Fox News carried the testimony of the whistelblowers live. Much of the media dismissed it all as "Republican talking points" or as the GOP "politicizing" a tragedy.

It's the other way around, actually. The Obama administration "politicized" their policy failures in Libya and Benghazi two months before a presidential election. They told a story to the American public about what happened that was false, up to and past a presidential election. Did I mention that there was a presidential election at stake, and that it was inconvenient to acknowledge that al-Qaida types carried out a coordinated attack that murdered our ambassador ON AN ANNIVERSARY OF 9/11 when the campaign narrative was "al-Qaida is decimated and on the run". That's politicizing, hardcore.

I've been outraged by Benghazi since before the attack on 9/11. Many of my online friends are not still, and mock it. But it matters.

It was foolish policy from day one of this misadventure. It was foolish for the Obama administration to jump into Libya's civil war as the "Arab Spring" was roiling North Africa. It was outrageous to commit lethal weapons use on behalf of the United Nations but not our Congress. It was outrageous to provide lethal weapons to al-Qaida affiliated "rebels" in a misguided effort to depose and kill a nation's leader without a vote of Congress. It was incompetence and malfeasance to send an Ambassador into an undersecured "Special Mission" (not an embassy or consulate), and to deny his pleas for more security in an area that was "Flashing Red" according to the bipartisan Senate report on the attack.
It was outrageous that there was no military response to rescue our exposed staff during an 8-hour long firefight in two locations in Benghazi. Two ex-special forces operators ignored orders to stand down and went to the aid of their colleagues. They died while providing cover fire on a roof at 4am from mortar fire while no one came to their aide. What good does it do to have Commanders-in-Extremis Forces (CIF) that can't - or are not allowed to - respond to an Ambassador in extremis in one of the true hot spots on the planet ON AN ANNIVERSARY OF 9/11?

The whistleblowers were in Congress this week testifying to denied security measures and to stand down orders on a military rescue. Who was listening? Were you listening? Who covered it, and who mocked it - and treated the brave witnesses as hostile witnesses? That's telling.

What will unravel, of course, is the cover-up. It always does. President Obama offered one generic reference in his speech on 9/12 to "no act of terror" will go unpunished. After that speech, he climbed on Air Force One and flew to a fundraiser in Las Vegas - making that day a political day in an election campaign. View his remark in that context.

After 9/12, every statement after coming from key players in the Obama Administration - from Obama, Clinton, Rice, etc. - downplayed terrorism as the cause and implicated an anti-Islamic YouTube video as the cause of a demonstration that became an attack. It's not true. Nor is it true that the administration didn't have evidence of a coordinated tIn errorist attack. So, why then did they tell that story? Why did the White House / State Department send Susan Rice on 5 Sunday talk shows to blame the video, using talking points altered by a political team in the midst of a presidential election to remove the intelligence about an attack by al-Qaida affiliates - who we had armed?

So, was President Obama telling us the truth on 9/12 when he said "no act of terror" would go unpunished? Consider the statement of the mother of Sean Smith - who was murdered in the attack alongside of Ambassador Stevens - on the O'Reilly Factor this week. She told the story of Hillary Clinton talking to her in front of the 4 flag-drapped coffins as their bodies returned from the site of their murder. "We're going to get the maker of that video", Hillary and others told Smith's mom. And they did. The video maker was arrested, and is in jail still. Not so much any al-Qaida types who carried out the attack in Benhazi.

We armed al-Qaida type "rebels" in Libya - specifically in Benghazi. Ambassador Stevens was there as our point man supporting the "rebels". Hours before he was killed, Ambassador Stevens met with the ambassador to Turkey - coincidentally a country through which we are now sending arms to the Syrian "rebels" to help take down Assad in their civil war. It's a continuation of foolish - and deadly - policy. Stop it already.

Benghazi is not the worst scandal in the Obama Administration. There are many, including this week's reveleation that his IRS was tartgeting Tea Party members, and on and on and on.

But Benghazi is outrageous on many fronts. And it matters.

The media, complicit with Team Obam during the election, is doing their best to dismiss this story. But, cover-ups unravel. And this cover-up is beginning to. Wake up, my friends.

Roger Ebert - an American Treasure - has Gone

Roger Ebert - a gracious and inspring man who passed away today - was my friend.

He didn't have to be. He was Roger Ebert, after all. He was an multi-talented accomplished man known world wide. He was America's best film critic, a gifted writer, and the purveyor of the best blog on the internet, bar none.

And I'm just Randy. A guy from small town MidWest America, with a day job unrelated to the film and entertainment world that Roger thrived in. So, how did I come to know Roger - and he know me?

I found Roger Ebert's Journal around Christmas 2008. I was on Rotten Tomatoes looking for a movie review, and I saw a headline that said "Roger Ebert's Worst Movie of 2008". I had to click on that, and the link took me to Roger Ebert's Journal - Roger's blog where he talked about things other than movie review like politics, religion, and science. The linked article was about the movie "Expelled" with Ben Stein, about the Intelligent Design controversy in schools, which Roger hated with a white hot passion. The article "Win Ben Stein's Mind" was about more than a movie review and explored Evolution vs. Creationism - a pet hobby of mine. It had a comments section, and I was in! I left a heated comment disagreeing with Roger's take. When I went back the next day, I was surprised to find that Roger had posted my comment and had embedded a reply to me that was a very civil in contrast to my heated post. Wow! I cooled it down and commented in kind. And that began a conversation on that thread every night with Roger and with commenters from around the world that lasted months and went for 3000 some comments on that thread before it stopped accepting comments.

Roger was energized by the Ben Stein thread, and wrote a few more articles in the same vein to continue the conversation. Of me, "the most stalwart defender of Intelligent Design", he wrote:

From "The Blogs of My Blog": "Randy Masters is revealed on "Lick Creek Photography" as not only a determined defender of Intelligent Design, but a gifted photographer...Randy is a good fellow for many reasons, not least for his key role is extending our debate on Darwin to a current total of 3,600 comments. He also traveled to Champaign-Urbana for my Ebertfest 2009

And this from "the Longest Thread Evolves": "It must be said that Randy Masters debated heroically...He was battered by the Darwinians but pulled himself up by the ropes and stepped back into the ring time and again...Since his argument, in my opinion, cannot be won, I was impressed by his persistence. I confess there were times when I wondered if he was deliberately acting as a devil's advocate, spurring on his opponents. Most of his predecessors had fallen out of the discussion, but he was game, ingenious, and sincere. And week after week, month after month, the thread grew."

Though I was often the odd man out on Roger Ebert's Journal - being a rare political conservative in a commenter community the attracted political liberals from around the world - Roger was always gracious to me, and often defended me. I challenged his views of the world, he would say to my many detractors, and he valued that. I was not a troll, he would periodically declare. I did irritate him at the end, especially on one memorable occasion when I fell for a particularly bad photoshop fake of Obama and linked it on the Journal. "Randy, you're such a tool", he said, but when I left the Journal for a bit in a defensive huff he encouraged me to come back and contribute.

Here's a tidbit. Roger was on the leading edge of technology on the web. When he became enthused in Twitter, I joined Twitter myself. I followed him, and suprisingly he followed me. Roger had more than a half million followers on Twitter, but he only followed two hundred or so and for a long while I was in that select group. Every now and then he would reply to, or retweet, one of my tweets. After the election in November, he Tweeted a link to my blog and my mea culpa on being wrong. I got a lot of hits that day! A highlight was the time that I sent a Tweet coming out of the movie Prometheus - a 140 character ironic movie review. He replied to me and I replied to him. And viola! Two days later his new blog post "Promethian Panspermia" on musing on the science of Prometheus was inspired by and referenced our three Tweet conversation. Another highlight was his gracious compliments for my photography website, which he referenced in "The Blogs of My Blog" and from which he used pictures to illustrate his article "The Autumn Leaves of Red and Gold". That meant a lot to me.

I met Roger at Ebertfest a few times. I've been four times, this year will be my 5th. The first time was in 2009, when we were still in the Ben Stein thread on the Journal. Roger emailed me and invited me down to the fest, where he graciously left a pass at the window. I went one day. I saw a Matt Dillon movie, with Dillon as the Q&A guest after the movie, and an amazing movie called "The Fall", a movie moment I'll never forget though I have had many more like it at EbertFest. I sat with Roger at a small Ebert Club breakfast and discussed my experience of seeing the restored version of the silent film "Metropolis" with the Alloy Orchestra playing the score live. Seeing a silent film was a "deeply inner experience" we agreed.

Roger enjoyed being one degree of separation of people meeting through him. The photo I'm posting here illustrates that. I met many of the people that I talked to virtually on the Journal live and in person at an EbertFest. No arguing politics or science there, we just hung out as friends and watched great movies together. One of my frequent sparring partners on the original Ben Stein thread was Dr. Dave Van Dyke. We disagree on most things, and have sprited debates online. Friends first, though, as we say. I had been at EbertFest 2010 for a couple of days when Dave and his lovely wife came down for a day. We met up in the Illini Union where a panel discussion was in progress. At the end, I took Dave over to meet Roger. "You two are here? Together??", he wrote on his notepad. He was astonished! Roger had Dave and I shake hands, and then he put his hand on top of ours for the picture. One degree of separation. Indeed. I've had that experience many times now, last year with my friend Rich Voza. And so many others.

 

Roger Ebert energized and inspired me, even though I disagree with him on most every topic except movies. He was my favorite movie critic by far. He was a brilliant writer - you'll not find any finer writing on the internet than his articles "How I Believe in God" or my favorite "I Remember You" . He was an intelligent and curious man. A caring man. A gracious man. And my friend, when he didn't have to be. I will miss our virtual talks.

Take a couple of minutes and read this bit of Roger's Journal musings. I disagree with the sentiments but, as always, marveled at the grace of the writing.

My 10 Questions on Benghazi

Here are my 10 questions on the Benghazi situation (scandal?):

1. Let' back up a bit. Did Libya attack the USA, and I missed it? (We were told that George Bush was wrong to take military action in Iraq – a country that had not attacked us. What justified Obama / Clinton taking military action to assist in the killing of a foreign leader in Libya? A potential massacre in Benghazi? Saddam Hussein routinely killed 100,000 of his own people every year through starvation and torture, but we were wrong to stop it there and required to stop it in Benghazi?

2. Did Libya attack NATO, and I missed it? (President Obama / Hillary Clinton / Susan Rice took military action in Libya at the behest of NATO and the Arab League, and without the consent of the US Congress – which they did not seek. Was the NATO treaty obligation triggered by an attack by Libya on a NATO signatory country and I missed it? We had no national interests in Libya. Why did we go there?)

3. Who were the “rebels” that Team Obama armed for their mission to kill Khadafi?  (President Obama signed an Executive Order authorizing the arming of “rebels” in Libya. Who were the rebels? What affiliations did they have with al-Qaida linked groups or other radical Islamist groups? What efforts were made to determine the affiliations or agendas of the “rebels”? )

4. Were any of the weapons provided by the US to the “rebels” then used in the deadly attack on our Consulate? Where did the mortars used to kill Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods originate?

5. What national interests justifies a US Consulate in Benghazi, one of the most dangerous parts of the world in the expansive and explosive “Arab Spring” movement, and were we conducting covert and nefarious business from that Consulate? ( Right before the organized terrorist attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, the US Ambassador to Libya had dinner with the Turkish ambassador. What was the purpose of that meeting? Is there fact to the rumor that we are currently running guns through Turkey to take down the next government leader – Assad of Syria?)

6. Who is responsible for the complete lack of security for a US Ambassador in a most dangerous part of the world. Embassy security is the responsibility of the Secretary of State – who signed ROE orders for that region limiting security, and who outsourced the security to a British firm who contracted Libyans who ran away? (unofficial WH advisor Valerie Jarrett had round the clock secret service protection on 9/11. Ambassador Stevens had nothing, and was savagely murdered by terrorists on Clinton’s watch.)

7. Why hasn’t Secretary Clinton, or anyone on her staff, been fired or resigned for the complete dereliction of duty that resulted in the death of a US Ambassador and 3 others and the black flag of al-Qaida raised over US embassies on an anniversary of 9/11? What does it take to get fired in this corrupt Chicago-machine style administration? What outrage is too much?

8. Why was there a separate CIA station operating one mile from the consulate? What nefarious business are they up to? Gun-running? Gun retrieving? Terrorist detention? What?

9. Why did President Obama send his UN Ambassador Susan Rice – a full Cabinet member on his staff – on five Sunday shows 5 days after a terrorist attack killed our US Ambassador to LIE to the American people and say that there was “no evidence” that this was a terrorist attack but it was instead a reaction to the YouTube video? (Clearly, evidence that al-Qaida affiliates were alive and well and capable of killing our Ambassador on an anniversary of 9/11 ran contrary to the Obama campaign narrative that al-Qaida had been decimated and had to be denied until “AE” – after the election. Team Obama clearly knew real-time that this was a terrorist attack. They had qualified eyes on the ground lasering mortar positions and drones watching the 7-hour attack at two locations.) This week President Obama was outraged in his press conference that Rice would be criticized, when she had "nothing to do with Benghazi". Then why send her on 5 Sunday shows to answer the media?

10. Was CIA chief Gen. David Patraeus blackmailed by the White House to lie to Congress during his original testimony to support the YouTube video story? Of course he was. He has now amended his testimony to say that he knew it was a terrorist attack within 24 hours. Conveniently, after the election but before he was to testify again to Congress Obama’s DOJ took Patraeus down with a sex scandal. Convenient.

Bonus question to my Democrat friends: why do you accept the administration's obvious and pervasive lies on Benghazi at face value?

The Benghazi story is not going to go away. I know some of you thought this was about the election. It was, but only on Team Obama's part. We're still asking the questions.

 

 

The

So Far Gone

Congressman (and erstwhile Presidential candidate) Ron Paul offered a stirring speech on the floor of the House on the event of his retirement after 12 terms this week. It said, in part:

"We're so far gone. We're over the cliff," the Texas Republican told Bloomberg Television's "In the Loop" program. "We cannot get enough people in Congress in the next 5-10 years who will do wise things."

 

Indeed. We are far gone, from fiscal responsibility and from liberty in the era of ever-expanding government, and it was a problem for the GOP in this last election.

 

I have said this for a long time now, but:

 

- You can't be 39 years and 53 million abortions down the road from Roe v. Wade and expect to make an argument on the morality of abortion. There are too many people - patients and spouses/partners/families - invested in the decision to have an abortion. They do not want to be told it was unwise, immoral, or problematic legally.

 

- You can't be $16 Trillion in total debt and $1.5 Trillion in annual deficit - numbers so gigantic as to defy practical and tangible understanding or concern - and make a case for fiscal responsibility and austerity.

 

- You can't be 15 million illegal aliens into an invasion of your border - generationally so - and make a case for border security. People don't want to be told that they - or their constituency base - have acted illegally and are a burden on our country.

 

People want rights, not responsibilities. People want to do illegal things and not be called on it. People want stuff, debt be damned. And Americans want abortions. Lots and lots of abortions.

 

So, the GOP has a choice. Do we stand on fundamental conservative principles or do we cave in to electoral realities?

 

Why cave? We already have a party that panders on those essentials. Why do we need two parties to do so?

 

Run a real conservative next time. Make the case anyway. That's my take.

It is Going to Be a Long Four Years

I am still bummed out from Tuesday night's election results. So much so that my coworkers nicknamed me "suicide watch" on Wednesday at work. Ouch, what a beating. So, what happened to the election?

You can read a lot of election post-mortems on the web. Pick a version: conservative sour grapes or liberal gloating. I personally like Paul Kengor's take on the strategies and Nick Nolte's mea culpa on the polling data.

Please indulge me my simple musings on what happened on this quadrennial first Tuesday in November wrestling match.

First, about the results:

I was wrong, and my frient J. David Van Dyke was completely and utterly right. There, I said it. Dave and I have had a bet on this election for at least a year, with the payoff being admission of rightness of the other plus some version of humiliation at EbertFest 2013. I have paid off half, and hope to pay off the rest in April in Champaign-Urbana. Dave made the case daily that it was a simple case of "the math" of the electoral college votes (EV). He predicted the states that Obama would win, which add to more than 270 and a win, and that's that. The popular vote is interesting, but not determinative - which is of course right.

The kicker here is that "the math" is variable depending on the turnout model used. Democrats (and Dem/media polls) were all in that the turnout would mirror the 2008 election and be D +6 or better. Republicans (and conservative media) were all in that 2008 was a historic anomaly, and that turnout would revert to the 2004 model of D +3 or less, which would yield a Romney win. I believed the latter, and believed that Democrats would not turn out in the same numbers that they did in 2008 - which I think is right - because their Hope candidate now had a record to defend. I also believed that Republican intensity - our shared disgust for the President's agenda - would be high, higher than in 2008, and that the D +3 or less was right. This was wrong. The GOP intensity turnout did not materialize. The result was that the ratio stayed the same as the 2008 model and the D +6 model was right. Exactly as Team Obama and the Mainstream Media (MSM) polls called it. Not at all as Team Romney and the conservative media polls called it. Dang. Dave was completely right.

Note: Looking back, I had to disregard a lot of fundamentals to stick with my prediction. Fundamentals, like the history that says incumbents almost always win. (I was swayed by Michael Medved's case that it wasn't so this time.) Indicators, like the jarring fact that 5 out of 7 of my management-type coworkers were voting for Obama when I thought they would be natural GOP voters. ("Nothing will change, so why make a change?" Wow.) I noted those things, but stayed with my pick and my confidence that the polls were oversampling Dems. At the very end, Michael Barone's call kept me in my position. I was wrong. The polls that I thought were the worst (PPP) were in fact the best. The polls that I thought were the best (Rasmussen) were in fact the worst. Dang. Lesson learned.

As of today, with the votes not all completely counted, the popular vote came out around 50% to 48%, in Obama's favor. A 2% win, much lower than his percentage win over McCain in 2008. Isn't 2% within the margin of error for polling? And Democrats - before you gloat much - shouldn't an incumbent who you regard as the best president ever with a great record win by a bigger margin than 2%? Just asking.

But if you win by 2% or better in 8 out of 9 battleground states, as Team Obama did, you get the landslide 303 EV win that was Tuesday night's result. Decisive, and inarguable. A big win. Congratulations to my Democrat friends. You were right. (Have I said that enough yet? :) )

Second, on a Dozen Factors leading to the result, in my humble opinion, in no particular order:

1. The Gift from John Roberts: I thought back in June that the election was over when Chief Justice John Roberts changed his vote and upheld ObamaCare with his tortured logic that it was a tax, not a mandate. What? Backstabber. This went a long way to take away the GOP argument that it needed to be repealed.

2. GOTV: Team Obama was much more effective in spending their war chest to Get Out the Vote than was Team Romney. They delivered the 2008 model. Kudos to David Axelrod, the evil genius.

3. Culture Change: Andrew Breitbart was right - politics is downstream from culture. We (the right) have lost the culture, and the election as the natural consequence. We've had the culture war, and the 1960's won. Dennis Miller said it for me, resigned to the results on O'Reilly: "This is where America is at. It's not the America I grew up in from 12 to 58, nor will it ever be again." Culture was the number one word that I saw on conservative Twitter on Wednesday. I am now an anomaly in my own country. I accept that.

4. Demographics: In the end, it wasn't about Ohio as everyone said. It was about a demographic shift that was not just an anomaly in 2008. It's the future. Pat Buchanan has been warning about that for a long time, and one day the wolf comes. This election was about the Latino and Asian votes, both of which went 71% or so for Obama. Much will be said now about GOP outreach - or lack thereof - to those two influential voting blocs.

5. Low information voters: I know that the gloating meme is that conservatives are the low information voters trapped in the conservative media bubble. It's not true. I read both. Folks on the left never read Drudge, Breitbart, TownHall etc. I was frustrated daily by Obama voters who watched not one minute of either convention or one second of any debate yet were quite certain that they knew how they went - and that "binders full of women" must be something really awful - because Yahoo News told them so. One friend is "proudly uninformed" and told me "There are more of me than there are informed voters like you." Sadly, true.

6. A bruising primary: Romney raised and spent more money, but had to spend a lot of it in a bruising primary defeating one conservative challenger after another. Obama was able to spend his smaller warchest immediately on the general election. That matters.

7. What conservative?: GOP primaries predictably produce the wrong candidate through a process where the group of conservatives SPLIT THE VOTE! and the one liberal emerges as the nominee. McCain in 2008. Romney - a NorthEast liberal who did ObamaCare before Obama - in 2012. Don't blame me. I voted Santorum in the primary.

Ann Coulter used to say that if you offer a choice between a liberal-lite and a real liberal America will choose the real liberal every time. She was right then. But she went all in for Romney in the primaries this time. Go figure.

8. Media Partners: More so than any election that I've participated in since 1980, the MSM went over the line in activism this time. They didn't just call the race, they shaped the race. They did so by tanking stories unfavorable to Obama (ex: Benghazi) and by overplaying stories unfavorable to Romney (ex: dog on the car roof, statement 9/11). Blatant bias. Influential bias.

9. the Nice Guys: Team Romney made the same crucial mistake that McCain made - at the instruction of their "expert consultants". That would be a decision not to go after Obama personally. They foolishly believed that the bad economy was enough for voters to make a change. They played it safe. They sat on their lead from the first debate. They stuck to a civil / positive message of "Obama is a nice guy, but we're more competent". Maddeningly foolish.

Team Obama - staffed by long-term players in the corrupt hardball Chicago Machine - had no such compunctions about civility. They spent their $400M ad buy savaging Romney in a nasty divisive personal attacks. He's a liar. He's a tax cheat and a felon. He'll put you back in chains and take away your birth control. He killed a guy's wife with cancer. It's all crap, but all cumulatively devastating and effective.

10. Santa Claus: People do not want austerity and cuts. They want stuff from their government. Obama had the checkbook to give it to them. Obamaphones. Auto bailouts. Amnesty and work permits. On and on and on, debt be damned. Rush is right: you can't beat Santa Claus.

11. "Osama bin Laden is dead, and GM is alive." This was brilliant. The most memorable slogan from the campaign. It's true as far as it goes, but misleading. bin Laden is dead, but al-Qaida is alive and well and dangerous in the Arab Winter. Obama didn't save GM, he saved the UAW pension fund. GM will go bankrupt again at a huge taxpayer loss. But, man, that slogan is brilliant.

12. The Courageous choice of Paul Ryan as VP. Marco Rubio would have been the wise crassly-political choice to court the Florida vote and the Hispanic vote. That might have made the difference. Romney made a non-political grown-up choice instead, knowing that the economy was the crucial issue if he was to govern and that Ryan was the capable man on the economy. Rubio is not ready. He will be in 2016 though, so there's that.

Last, on the future of elections: I deserve no predictions on this. I was so wrong this time.

But, if I was to predict the future of elections I would say this: this loss was pivotal and total. The GOP is done. The Tea Party is done. We are now in the zone similar to my state of Illinois. Sure there are some GOP officeholders around. But, they are irrelevant. We are effectively a one-party Democrat state. (Related: the 2nd brokest state in the union.)

Why? Because of ObamaCare. It is the singular achievement - the fundamental transformation - that locks in a permanent Democrat majority going forward. It is now unstoppable - the law of the land. It will make government dependents of many more people, perhaps all of us, and the Party of Government will be the beneficiaries for the foreseeable future. Irreversibly. The American Experiment in liberty is over, and we are Europe. Chosen by the slimmest of majorities in a bitterly divided America, but chosen nonetheless and locked in. It's ever-expanding government from here until the collapse. Depressing, but cold hard reality.

That's my take, anyway. Leave a comment with yours.

What is the point?

So, a friend asked me this week in the comments on a political blog: What is the point of arguing?

By that he meant what is the point of arguing with me. That I'm obstinate and unpersuadable on the facts.

I was thinking the same thing.

What is the point of arguing politics online in this election season? There is no pont in doing it.

We are as polarized as it gets. We live in ever more segregated fact environments. You can live in your own news-gathering bubble that confirms your worldview and not need to be confronted with another worldview. Be irritated, in fact, by being confronted with a different worldview.

It's tiring. I'm tired of being told that:

- I'm a tool of the right-wing media

- I don't really believe what I'm saying but am just winding people up

- My team doesn't have critical thinking skills or,

- I don't know what terms like "socialist" means

- My team consists of bad / stupid / racist people

I'm done.

I have books to read. Unplugging from the argument...